


Do Wolves Dream of Bloodied Sheep (with wings and teeth)

by MightBeEntropy



Series: The Dandelion's Plight [2]
Category: The Witcher (TV), Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Curse Breaking, Curses, Dreams, Emotionally Constipated Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia, Geralt is a good dad, Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia Has Feelings, Hallucinations, Monster of the Week, Multi, No beta we die like Geralt's self worth, POV Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia, Pining, Post-Episode: S01E06 Rare Species, Post-Episode: s01e08 Much More, Spells & Enchantments, Witches, can be read as standalone
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-06
Updated: 2020-09-06
Packaged: 2021-03-07 01:33:51
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,322
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26328715
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MightBeEntropy/pseuds/MightBeEntropy
Summary: "If life could give you one blessing-” He knows, whatever the next words are, he will not be prepared for them; he is not prepared even though he knows not what the next words are. Please-“-it would be me.”The back of his eyelids burn dryly.Geralt’s shaking hands are fisted in the front of the bard’s green doublet so tightly his fingers bruise his palms through the fabric. It quite effectively prevents the next lyric from being belted out. The tavern is dead silent and static other than the dozens of pounding heartbeats exacerbating his migraine as the witcher snarls, the acrid stench of fear wafting into his nose. “Where did you hear that song?”He needs to know, because there is a ghost. A ghost of Jaskier that never leaves. The brilliant blue of his doublet in the corner of the tavern bleaches Geralt’s retinas like drinking Cat in the middle of the day."Where?"Or; Jaskier doesn't come back but Geralt doesn't stop waiting for him. A child surprise is acquired amidst the grieving and curses.
Relationships: Cirilla Fiona Elen Riannon & Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia, Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion
Series: The Dandelion's Plight [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1667620
Comments: 44
Kudos: 351





	Do Wolves Dream of Bloodied Sheep (with wings and teeth)

**Author's Note:**

> So. This isn't technically the faerie-reveal sequel to Litany of the Flower. But I felt it important enough to the series to post, especially considering how long said sequel is taking to get written. 
> 
> I'll reiterate, this can be read as standalone as it essentially happens after season one of the TV series.

Jaskier always comes back. It is debatable if this is a fundamental fact of reality rooted in the man’s outrageous personality or just a fortunate side effect of Geralt’s acquaintance with the bard, but the origin of Jaskier’s clinginess is significantly less important than its existence. Geralt is greatly reassured, although he would never tell a soul, that the smell of Jaskier never truly fades with their separation before the bard is back in his life and reinforcing the scent of flowery perfumes and lute oil to something that still tingles on his witcher’s tongue months after they part ways again. It is familiar and soothing. Once, when Jaskier had told him he would not be able to travel with him for at least three seasons, Geralt had stolen a pair of the bard’s gloves and tucked them under his armour, pressed up against his chest to preserve the smell. The bard had not noticed, or he had not deigned to bring it up. Geralt was grateful; the staggering amount of shit and teasing he had gotten from his brothers after a winter at Kaer Morhen was enough that he was happy not to discuss it ever again, much less with the object of his... attentions. 

Nine months- almost to the day, after Geralt had shouted at Jaskier atop a mountain, the witcher had woken up to find that he could no longer smell his bard and proceeded to have a breakdown consisting of loud howling- _not crying_ , just embarassingly close to it, but witchers _didn’t_ cry despite how fucking determined Jaskier is to test every fucking myth about witchers even in his absence- and emptying out all his belongings onto the ground to dig frantically and hunt for the last vestiges of scent from his ex-travelling companion, hopefully imprinted on some potion bottle touched by errant hands when the bard had been looking for something while they had still been together and the world had been Geralt and his stupid little not-so-humble bard against a world that didn’t like them until they had screamed at it enough.

Instead of an empty potion bottle or scrap of old unwashed clothing, he had found the gloves he had lifted off his bard years ago in their stained leather glory.

Geralt would be the first person to reiterate that witchers do not cry.

However, if one analysed the facts available on hand, namely, that according to a disgruntled Lambert, cat witchers could cry and did cry with frustrating frequency, one might conclude that witchers did actually have the ability if not the capacity to weep as any human being. Seeing that this information is bad for the reputation of any witcher, hiding one’s tears is less an acquired skill and more of a necessity no matter how Jaskier would disagree.

Geralt had not cried when he found the gloves. Or maybe he had. Just a little. And only because the pain that speared his heart was so terrible his vision darkened at the edges. It may have been partially due to the blood loss from fighting three basilisks and nearly being disemboweled when the witcher was blindsided by the third one, but the adrenaline and potion crash after had not been even considerable next to the agony of missing Jaskier, the agony of the epiphany that he had been apart from his bard longer than they had ever been- unknowing of Jaskier’s physical and emotional well-being. 

It is an all-encompassing ache he still carries with him like a bruise to the kidneys or some vital organ that spreads outwards to pulse right under his skin, almost annoyingly in the way of his life. Persistent.

Geralt would rather fall upon his swords than rid himself of the ache. He is no masochist but the concept of removing the pain of missing Jaskier is not dissimilar to amputating an infected limb; his reluctance is fueled heavily by uncharacteristic sentimentality and a crippling lack of common sense. Logically, Geralt knows in order to return to the status quo and hopefully survive at least another decade he will have to cut out the part of him that distracts him so, if not literally, since he has his doubts that even witchers can survive the surgical removal of a heart, then in the very least figuratively, and repress how he feels beneath a solid wall of rationality until he stops missing Jaskier in the first place. 

This is not an acceptable outcome in any way. 

Geralt doesn’t _want_ to forget about missing Jaskier. He doesn’t want to stop missing Jaskier. Because Jaskier always comes back to him eventually and Geralt usually only has to wait the bard out. If Geralt stops missing Jaskier, he will lose hope and might stop waiting for his bard to come back, and he will have to deal with the sick feeling of nauseous grief in the pit of his stomach at the idea that he will _never_ see Jaskier again. They will not meet by accident like he does with Yennefer due to their djinn-entwined fates, because if Jaskier is actually putting in effort into making sure they don’t cross paths and he truly does not wish to see Geralt, then it is highly probable they will _never fucking meet_ as Jaskier is downright overzealous in his avoidance of people, like his family who live in Kerack where the bard was born and raised even though Jaskier is officially a certified Redanian because that is how fucking _dedicated_ he is.

Hence, Geralt does not stop waiting for his bard to return.

Having to grieve Jaskier may actually depress him to the point where he _does_ fall upon his swords. Geralt can’t for the life of him figure out how to grieve when there is still even the slightest chance he will wake up the following morning and Jaskier will be tucked in his arms like he had never left, filling his senses with flora and music. 

It is a beautiful dream. Probably the most beautiful one Geralt has ever had the audacity to even consider, except that when he starts that train of thought he has to shut it down quick before it gets out of hand. The desire to rip Jaskier out of whatever life he is currently living away from Geralt is a constant strain on his willpower. 

But Geralt will not look for Jaskier. Geralt will not need to.

Jaskier always comes back.

Doesn’t he?

At most times, there is no room for ruminating in his head; there is simply too much bloodshed and fighting that takes up his capacity for thought. It is a familiar dance- duck, parry, aim for the throat, find Roach, hunt. Blood under his fingernails, wash it out. Rinse, repeat. How many months pass monotonously, marching away while Geralt is grieving-not-grieving, can only be counted by the number of hunts he somehow picks up even without a bard’s loud advertisements in every town. It used to be how he counted time’s passage when he had first started walking the path and his body count had not yet exceeded double digits. The habit had gradually started slipping with every decade bringing new wary eyes and scorn at every town, and had been laid to rest after Blaviken when the disillusionment had robbed his last scraps of faith in humanity, finally stealing his quiet hopes he had whispered to his horse far from civilisation because the shame of wishing and wanting was not for anyone’s eyes but his faithful, silent companion’s. When _Toss a Coin_ brought less wary eyes and a semi-permanent companion he had to be careful to not get attached to, he had counted weeks by his bard’s writing processes producing new songs, years by the strangely lonely winters Jaskier spent in Oxenfurt. 

Now, his life is neatly divided into three parts. Before Jaskier, the time spent with Jaskier, and After. Just _After_ , never _After Jaskier_ , because Geralt’s hopes are not yet extinguished like they had been after Blaviken, even though at the time he had swore to himself to never get his hopes up for anything ever again. Of course, the bard hadn’t cared a whit of what post-Blaviken Geralt had wanted. Jaskier had stealthily entered his life with deceptive subtlety, cracking open the decades-fortified cage around his heart. Travelling with Jaskier had softened him for his child surprise, like a hard leather glove softened after repeated use. It’s almost convenient, or fate that has prepared him for travelling with a human, except he never thinks along those lines because it would suggest that Jaskier’s purpose in Geralt’s life is fulfilled and Destiny has no use for having the bard in Geralt’s future _and Geralt isn’t ready to grieve Jaskier’s absence yet_. 

Yet, against all preconceived expectations, Geralt’s life continues without his bard. Just barely. 

Geralt finds his child surprise sans Jaskier, dizzy from poison and ready to retire like the bard once suggested he do. The achievement feels hollow as he remembers that he had thought he would be travelling with his bard when he found her so the bard could talk to her and provide decent human interaction and comforting to assuage her inevitable fear of a hulking six foot witcher with an intimidating amount of visible weaponry. Maybe his fever-weakened state will put her at ease, maybe-

Oh.

He needn’t have worried about his child surprise’s reaction to himself. The nose-turning fear never comes. She hugs him, tiny compared to the great gaping maw of the entire world out to get her and Geralt fervently thinks, _holy shit, I will raze mountains to protect you_. 

“You aren’t afraid of me.” It is a question by the broadest definition of the word, because he doesn’t trust his nose or eyesight at the current moment. Or himself. He can see a spectre in blue silk in the corner of his eye when he squints and his vision isn’t its usual clarity yet. Fucking ghouls.

“You are my destiny.” Ciri turns searching eyes to his face, where he buries the threads of guilt in the downturn of his mouth. “How can anyone be afraid of destiny?”

“You would be surprised,” He mutters wryly. It is practically an apology even if she does not understand. Jaskier would be proud. 

He stifles that thought and blinks harder to clear his vision. He doesn’t realise he has turned his head to peer at where Jaskier should be by his side until the princess is ducking under his arms and asking him what he’s looking for.

“Nothing.” He says. 

He ends up saying that a lot. It is a lie, every single time except in all the ways it isn’t.

He finds nothing. He waits for nothing. He doesn’t stop.

Ciri doesn’t call him out on lying even after he’s lied a hundred times.

To return the favour, he doesn’t call her out on lying when she tells him she has had a good night’s sleep even when her eyes are bruised and her voice shaky.

Geralt still doesn’t know what to do about his child surprise’s nightmares. 

Let it not be said, especially by melodramatic _bards_ with a penchant for exaggerating and mangling things to the point of illegibility, that Geralt of Rivia lacks all sense of emotional intelligence. Jaskier has- Jaskier _had_ a fondness for performing an entire multiple-act spectacle of surprise, fraught with matching facial expressions and exclamations whenever the witcher had managed to display anything beyond a socially awkward ineptness born of his upbringing in a stone stronghold locked away from civilisation by mountains and passes as deadly as they were beautiful, and Geralt would inwardly think about huddling together with Eskel and his trial-mates whispered silly words of comfort or tales heard from the senior wolves that were so outlandish they made everyone laugh. As it turns out, comforting a child is much the same even without the looming threat of the trials wiping out most of your cohort, and Ciri laughs just as hard as his dead brothers once did when they sit around their campfire and Geralt answers some of her questions about life in Kaer Morhen with anecdotes that had taken Jaskier literal years, or maybe months, to pry free from the witcher. Geralt is well and truly soft.

Necessarily soft, he would defend viciously to anyone who remarks on his softness. Ciri is a child, maybe six or seven years younger than Jaskier had been when they first met, and she has been dealt such a bad hand by life and destiny that she is the last person on the continent to deserve his ire. Perhaps after Jaskier.

No matter. There is no point in missing Jaskier, except maybe missing his skill for comfort and human interaction that Geralt sorely needs. No point thinking about him and whatever life he’s leading. Geralt avoids news of him and places he’s heard had a good bard in town religiously so as to not fuel his half-baked plans to kidnap his bard. Jaskier is a distraction Geralt can’t afford, even as thoughts of him plague the witcher with a persistence matched to the man. He feels guilty about it, although he cannot help his thoughts; there is shame in knowing his child is similarly plagued by thoughts of a far worse nature than his idyllic daydreaming. Ciri is a child and currently his first priority. So her half-asleep whimpers and tears are his priority too.

What would Jaskier do if he were here?

“Ciri.” He calls her one night that came after a series of nights consisting of interrupted meditation and his awkward attempts at comfort. She looks up at him. So far so good. He swallows the salt on his palate and averts his eyes so she can have a facade of privacy to wipe away her snot. Which she does. Loudly and with a grotesque emphasis that he is sure is just her trying to freak him out. She giggles tiredly when he shudders obligingly. 

“What is it, Geralt?” She calls him Geralt. It feels both weirdly too impersonal and personal. Geralt can’t figure out why.

He opens his mouth and immediately his throat seals itself, which is very unconducive to Geralt’s mimicry of his bard. It is unoften that Jaskier is quiet when addressed directly; the opposite problem arises far more frequently- one would ask Jaskier a short, possibly yes or no question that would cause derailment and digression of the likes Geralt has yet to see repeated by anyone else, and it would leave Geralt dizzy with the reminder his humble bard is educated in the field of philosophy. 

And psychology. The annoying little shit. Jaskier knows how to treat people, how people think.

“I- I can braid your hair.” It is probably what Jaskier would offer. A form of comfort to both the braider and braidee. Repetitive. Easy to do.

“You?” Ciri raises an incredulous eyebrow. Instant visceral doubt in believing the existence of anything and everything wells up in his stomach. Her grandmother must have taught her that particular trick. “You can braid my hair?”

“...yes.” Fuck. How did one braid hair? Jaskier’s deft fingers- which Geralt _does not_ spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about- did not weave portions of hair the way Witcher’s were taught to weave rope; the intricate hairdos Geralt had seen in Roach’s mane and tail looked nothing like the thick, functional pattern he knew how to recreate.

Ciri graciously ignores his crisis and moves to sit next to him on his bedroll, craning her neck so the witcher has access to her platinum hair. 

Geralt swallows, and begins to part her hair eight times as evenly as he is able with the fine strands slightly frizzed from humidity. Once he is done, he layers the lengths of hair over one another, backtracking when he realises he should have untangled the clumps and burrs in his child surprise’s curls. Ciri’s heart rate picks up when he curses, but she relaxes into his side when he begins anew his braiding.

_...rope constructions like the eight-stranded plait are knobbed for mooring purposes-_

_I am never going to remember all of that, laughs Jaskier. Why do you overcomplicate the process? It’s phenomenally simpler with a little song: one rope down, another on top, two on the bottom, and don’t you stop, because three ropes down-_

“You… you’re hummin’.” Ciri yawns. “I knew it. You ca’ sing.”

Geralt’s heart stutters, but his hands keep twisting threads of hair. The beat of Jaskier’s singing guides him. “I can’t sing.” He murmurs, glad that his child surprise can’t see his face.

“S’ called... denial.” She murmurs sagely, right before her head drops into his lap, breathing low and peaceful.

Geralt tucks the finished braid under her neck and carries her to her bedroll, still humming.

_-three ropes down, we count to four-_

Nailed it.

Ciri takes one look at her hair in the reflection of a creek the following morning and bursts into a fit of barely dignified giggles.

“My head looks weaponised,” She manages to convey before she gives into her hysterics, waving off Geralt’s awkward offers at redoing her hair.

Fucking bards. Geralt is never listening to Jaskier ever again.

He pulls Ciri’s hood up as they walk into town so he doesn’t have to look at the hairdo that she is embarrassingly proud of. The cheeky grin she keeps shooting back at him as she pulls the hood to lay along her neck warms his chest like white gull passed around in the dead of winter.

When he first hears the song being played in the tavern, he doesn’t know Jaskier wrote it. The cadence of it is hauntingly catchy to his ears and Geralt knows too little about music theory other than the knowledge that he has accumulated over two decades of travelling with a professional musician to comment on anything other than how the bard who is singing fumbles a few notes in a way Jaskier would never dare to do, shitty tavern or otherwise. The bard lacks the flair of Geralt’s bard, lacks the passion and zeal for the music he sings, alerting the witcher to the fact that the song is most likely not his own. Most bards wear an overinflated air of pride or self-consciousness when singing their own compositions.Geralt makes a dismissive noise through his teeth, low enough that none of the other patrons notice but not too soft to escape his new travelling companion’s notice.

Brightly coloured eyes flash as they flit between the bard and Geralt’s face. “You do that often, did you know that? You do that very, very often.”

The matter-of-fact tone amuses him although the words do not. The witcher turns away with a neutral hum, studying the tavern doorway with masked petulance that does not shift his expression in the slightest. His companion is undeterred, huffing in frustration at his silence. Jaskier would have seen through his aloofness and caught onto the fact that he wasn’t going to explain himself, but his travelling companion is not Jaskier.

“Are you not going to explain why?” Ciri demands with the air of a princess, or a child still brimming with curiosity unbroken by her harrowing flight across the continent. She is very precocious. Geralt smiles affectionately without smiling. “You don’t seem like the type of person to care about what other people sing. But you do.” 

“I don’t.” He doesn’t. Although the lyrics are fairly repetitive in the way Jaskier’s verses can be when he is pandering or trying out a motif like a new set of rings on his slender fingers. Did rings come in sets? A witcher wouldn’t know. Geralt studies his own fingers. A horrible stretch of raised skin spans just above his knuckles, fresh without the fading the passing of years brings. A werewolf slashed at them, months ago. Jaskier would have sewn the torn pieces of skin together gently to prevent severe scarring. Geralt had simply stared hard enough at it to ascertain that the wound was longer and wider than it was deep, and likely wouldn’t result in lasting damage before he fell into meditation.

The bard in the corner warbles on, a wicked caricature in olive green of the bard that should be glued to Geralt’s side and singing annoyingly catchy songs. “- _then my heart is but a flower, and my heartbeat a litany_ -”

“You don’t seem like you don’t care,” Ciri insists, drumming her little fingers with the beat on the table. “Do they teach music theory at… Kair- Keer- wolf-witcher school?”

Geralt exhales quickly, breathing out a snort that threatens to find its place in his nose. “Kaer Morhen. No.”

“Kaer Morhen. That’s what I said. I can’t imagine where else you could have learnt it.” She ignores his amused huff. “I learnt some music theory in C-Cintra as part of my lessons. Did you learn it in Cintra when you came? Did you have the same teacher as me? We had a viscount-turned-troubadour who came during my birthday month. Did he teach you music theory?”

 _Viscount-turned-troubadour._ “I don’t know music theory.” Not for the lack of effort on said troubadour’s part.

“Oh.” Ciri frowns. “Are you sure?”

Out of the corner of his eye, Geralt catches peacock blue perched on the unoccupied stool at their little corner of the tavern. He turns. There’s no one. No smell. His good humour fades. “...yes.”

“-O’ _my heartbeat a litany, like the way you called to me_ ,” 

The bard dances, a little half-step forward then backward, swaying gracelessly like a boat in a storm. Jaskier would-

“Did you know a bard?” Ciri asks softly. Geralt whips his head back around to face her when her scent turns embittered and saline with tears. The witcher gulps inaudibly at her very wide, wet eyes and panics internally as she leans forward to clasp one of his hands in her tiny palms, voice pitched lower to escape the notice of the surrounding patrons. “Did they die? Is tha-”

“No.” An absurd possibility. Geralt never considered his bard would be unable to come back to him- “ _No._ ”

Her expression is overwhelmingly sympathetic and annoyed all at once. “You don’t have to lie to me because I’m a child. I’m aware that living on the road is dangerous because one’s friends may become seduced by river water to desire becoming a tree-person-entity-”

 _What the fuck?_ The sentence is legible similar to how Jaskier’s pretentious poetry is when constructed of words that made perfect sense by their lonesome but are meaningless drivel when scraped together. “Hm.”

“- _do not interrupt me, Geralt!_ -or that one’s lovers pass away in tragic accidents-” The princess’s eyes are growing increasingly shiny as she pauses to inhale. “-and sometimes the wound is not yet healed, so any little reminder of them hurts-”

She gasps, loudly, clapping her hands over her mouth. Geralt startles badly at the screech of the stool as she rises to her feet suddenly. “The song! The song reminds you of them! That is so sad! I shall get the bard to stop playing it immediately!” She darts towards the throng of people and valiantly tries to wiggle through the crowd with little success to reach the bard playing across the tavern.

“Ci- Fiona!” He stutters, feeling distinctly overwhelmed by the rapid-fire incomprehensible speech that required a lot of processing ability and the emotional trauma of picturing his bard dead. Ciri just waves back at him and dives between the legs of people, disappearing from his sight in a swirl of blue fabric like a little vagabond. Geralt justifiably panics, tasting bile. _He can’t see her._

“Fuck!” He stands and glares into the teeming mass of patrons, biting his lip against the onslaught of images of Ciri being trampled. “Fiona!”

The bard is _still fucking singing_ , and it’s not Geralt’s bard’s voice but undoubtedly one of his compositions in how _fucking irritating_ it is and how it raises the hairs at the back of the witcher’s neck as he listens. “ _\- O’ the flower’s litany, tragic tale it may be_ -”

He grits his teeth and turns back to the table, to the blue. “Gods, she needs to be more careful; she’s just like you, Jas-”

There’s no one there. 

Of course there wouldn’t be, Geralt reminds himself dizzily, Jaskier’s been gone for over a year-

“ _When you call to me,_ ” The bard croons, inflection wrong and grating, Geralt’s head aching with every new word and the certainty that he knows who has written the song, who has lovingly penned these words down on paper with a pink slip of tongue tucked between teeth while the ink stained his fingertips, who has left Geralt, possible forever- “ _I hope that you can see-_ ”

The tune- vindictive, utterly furious- reaches its crescendo, and goes back down. “ _That if life could give you one blessing,_ ”

Geralt is distantly aware that his feet have left their place glued to the corner of the tavern and are moving towards the bard with loud stomping footsteps that cause the surrounding patrons to part and move out of his way like he’s the rampaging monster they all fear he is, but everything he feels is dissociated and secondary to the dread in the forefront of his mind. 

“ _O’ if life could give you one blessing-_ ” He _knows_ , whatever the next words are, he will not be prepared for them; he is not prepared even though he knows not what the next words are. _Please-_

“ _-it would be me._ ” 

The back of his eyelids burn dryly. 

Geralt’s shaking hands are fisted in the front of the bard’s green doublet so tightly his fingers bruise his palms through the fabric. It quite effectively prevents the next lyric from being belted out. The tavern is dead silent and static other than the dozens of pounding heartbeats exacerbating his migraine as the witcher snarls, the acrid stench of fear wafting into his nose. “Where did you hear that song?”

He needs to know, because there is a ghost. A ghost of Jaskier that never leaves. The brilliant blue of his doublet in the corner of the tavern bleaches Geralt’s retinas like drinking Cat in the middle of the day.

The nameless bard whimpers, mouth working open and closed like a dying fish. Spineless, not like Jaskier-

No. No dwelling on that now. “Where?”

Geralt knows the answer even before the man’s vocal chords vibrate in a hoarse whisper. “Ox- oxenfurt!”

His heart _aches_. With relief. Sorrow.

There had been an old fear of Geralt’s, eventually overtaken by Geralt’s early-birthed fear of being the reason Jaskier would get hurt. An old, small, trite little fear of Jaskier himself, of the idea of Jaskier and the concept of letting anyone too close to the witcher. It was an old, Vesemir-voiced, paranoia that the bard would hurt him, would know exactly how to twist the metaphorical knife when the time came because Geralt had let himself be vulnerable. It was a fear that had been quickly obviously unfounded when the bard turned out to be utterly harmless by himself but dangerous in how Geralt would do anything for him.

The entire situation, however, is very much Jaskier twisting the knife.

Geralt’s heart aches. Jaskier is talented, so very much more talented than Geralt gives him credit for; how effectively he has slipped a dagger between the witcher’s ribs and applied enough pressure to send it deep without killing.

Yet even now, the fear of Jaskier is miniscule compared to the fear _for_ Jaskier, the fear of his hands bruising, hurting his bard. Because falling in love with Jaskier is the worst thing Geralt has ever done, unforgivable in its entirety-

“Dad!”

Ciri. The dull green fabric slips through his fingers. Geralt steps away from the growing pool of piss and the bard’s dejected whimpering, the witcher’s throat clogging like coagulated blood over an old wound. The figurative knife clatters to the floor, damage done. 

It is painfully ironic that Jaskier is now pulling at the seams of the reputations of witchers after two decades of singing song cycle after song cycle to cement a witcher’s role as that of a hero instead of a monster. Or maybe the mere concept had been too idealistic to survive without constant maintenance. Humans are forgetful creatures, memory spans often short enough that being grateful is nothing more than a myth in a world where sons sold their mothers for coin to blow on booze and whores. Geralt had seen it happen enough that he almost understood his mother’s motivations, before Ciri had been placed in his care and he realised abandoning anyone who was dependent on others to survive was bullshit.

Abandoning children in particular is bullshittery of the highest level. Inexcusable. Just above abandoning baby animals. No sane person would do it. Definitely not around Geralt if they wanted to live.

Ciri worms her way to him, a stark reminder of humanity in the sea of it whispering in outrage for one of their own. Geralt thinks he understands.

The witcher makes for the door without glancing at the bard. Either of them.

The smell of anxiety follows him out- pepper and lime on his palette. Ciri does too, in a rustle of expensive fabric and tavern-floor dust that makes his nose itch from a few feet away. She collects dust much faster than Jaskier ever did, possibly because of her proximity to the ground compared to tall, broad Jaskier who liked heeled boots even though they hurt his feet if he walked for long periods of time. Or maybe it is a child thing. Children already have the stupefying ability to metamorphosise their palms into sticky swamps that leave stains on everything they come into contact with, why not an inherent aptitude for collecting dust? 

Jaskier would know. He had complained about his younger cousins a few times. Ciri might know, but she would riot at being called a child, and a shrill scolding from her can very easily be misconstrued by passing humans who have already made up their mind about witchers.

Geralt wearily tunes out the muffled shouting from the tavern.

_Fucking mutant-_

_Rampaging-_

_-monstrous-_

“Geralt, what are we even looking for?” Ciri's steady gaze bores holes into the back of his armour, through the leather like an awl.

He sighs and slows so she can close the distance between them. “Roach.” If there is no contract, he wants to put as much distance between himself and the godforsaken town. And the song. And the traumatised bard.

“No, I mean- what are _you_ looking for?” Geralt frowns at her earnestness. She skips ahead to meet his eyes, staring so intently while she waits on his answer that he gets a disconcerted feeling that she is having a conversation different from the one he is hearing and just barely responding to. “We’ve been walking towards Redania for days, but I had thought we were on route to Kaer Morhen!”

“We are.” Ciri’s lips thin in displeasure.

“Are we? But it is near Kaedwen, isn’t it? We’re not even going in the right direction.” Geralt’s spine and facial muscles stiffen. Ciri notices. “Is it Yennefer? Who are you looking for?”

If he stares at his feet hard enough maybe they will start moving faster again. “No one.” Redania can be on the way to Kaedwen. Oxenfurt is south enough. If they pass Oxenfurt-

_Ah. Oxenfurt. Jaskier sighs deeply._

_My home away from home, if you will._

_You’d hate it._

No. He is looking for no one. Ciri is right. They should be following a more direct path to Kaer Morhen, not taking a detour. 

Nilfgaard is at their heels. They will stop for no one.

_No one._

“You’re looking for someone.” Ciri declares with utmost surety.

Geralt sighs again. His feet remember to walk. “No.”

“Yes.” She bounces on the soles of her worn boots. She needs new ones.

Hmm. “No.”

“Yes!” Geralt rolls his eyes.

“You can’t annoy me into telling you things. A man once tried for over twenty years.” It slips out. Unretractable. Geralt hates talking.

Ciri nods, awe creeping over her face. “And now he’s dead by your hand.” She whispers reverently.

Geralt chokes on his own spit. “He’s not dead!” _He’s not dead. He isn’t._ The despair is immediately swallowed by how Ciri looks disappointed in him, seemingly disappointed by his lack of homicide. Melitele’s tits, what the hell had Calanthe been teaching the girl?

“Oh.” She grabs his arm, inspiration shining in her eyes. “What did the bard say to you?”

The witcher’s throat closes up like a cauterised wound. “Hmm.”

She lets go, her chagrin more bitter than he had expected. Why is she so focused on his issues, anyway? “Geralt! I’ll run back and ask him myself, I swear!”

“You will not. We’re leaving.” 

Ciri’s mouth drops open in surprise. “Already? But… your contract?” Her expression brightens.

“The board did not have any notifications.”

“Oh.” She toes a line in the dirt, her scent going muted. Is she sad? She smells sad. Why is she sad? Teenagers are weird.

“Aye, doesn’t mean there’s no monster, just that the local lord likes his trade uninterrupted.” Geralt flinches at the new voice, baring his teeth at the approaching person who had sneaked behind the pair while he had been preoccupied with making sense of human emotions.

“Who are you?” The woman scoffs at his churlishness with mostly sincere bravado, although the shitty-ale and soapy-linen smell of her is interspersed by the salt of the single nervous sweat beading on her nose. Brave in spite of fear. Or maybe because of it. No bravery without fear, Jaskier would rhapsodise. 

“The woman who was two seconds away from booting you out of her tavern. Lee.” The tavern-keeper props her hands on her hips. “You could learn to control your temper.”

“And you could go fuck yourself.” Geralt replies without missing a beat. The bard had been a shitty singer. And he had spent a good portion of time singing non-Jaskier songs. He had it coming. He shoots Ciri an apologetic look, but she simply beams cheerfully back at him, clearly entertained at the exchange. Inexplicably, Lee’s shoulders relax a fraction at his barb. Interesting.

The woman circles around Geralt to peer at his child-surprise, inspecting her with unveiled interest. The witcher fights the urge to rip out her eyes. There is no threat in the woman’s posture, just something empathetic. Human.

“And you, little lass, you shouldn’t run from your father like that, hm?” Lee wags a water-calloused finger. 

Ciri’s glare is spectacular. “I want to go hunting too.”

What? Geralt recoils inwardly at the idea of his child being anywhere near a monster. “Why?”

“I am bored.” She informs him primly, chin tipping upwards. Geralt fights the urge to bury his head in his hands, settling for pinching the bridge of his nose.

He looks up. They are nearly at the stables. “What’s the monster?”

The woman flushes with embarrassment. “No idea.”

“You’ll have me chasing an imaginary beast? No.” Geralt half-runs towards his ever-reliable, loyal, Roach, before halting to wait because his child-surprise’s legs are significantly shorter than his and cannot outrun well-meaning tavern keepers. 

“Lord Vaughan’s paying one hundred crowns to whoever can bring him its head.” Lee shouts hurriedly.

Geralt sighs. It is good money. Needed money, considering their destination and their need to lay low. “Why?”

“It’s been putting a good number of people into a cursed sleep. Good folk.” Lee clears her throat awkwardly. “Cursed the dowager-seamstress last week and before that was the ol’ baker’s nephew. Poor lad, well-liked. The alderman was heartbroken. They were engaged, you see.”

“Fine.” The word is wrenched out. Ciri immediately starts vibrating out of her skin in excitement.

“Can I-?”

“I need someone to take care of Fiona.” He gives Ciri a look. She hadn’t been allowed before. He isn’t about to start when he doesn't even know what his contract is out for. It could be harmless, like a lesser fae with a slighted honour who would be appeased with milk and honey, or it could be a higher vampire casting blood magic. Which. Would not go down well.

“I want to come with you!”

“No.” Ciri glares like she’s trying to combust his face with her mind.

“No, lass.” Lee adds.

Geralt stares at her consideringly. She’s brave. Jaskier would like her. “I’ll pay you ten crowns on my return if you-”

Lee’s hands fly up to show her cracked palms. “I’m not a brothel prostitute, witcher. I won’t take your payment.” She hesitates, swallowing twice. “But your lass can come with me.”

“What? No!” Ciri’s made similar, more eloquent protests in the past, but she is putting in more effort into trying to dig a trench in the dirt than she is actually fighting the decision.

“No one accompanies a witcher on his hunts.” Lee tuts, as if she has not heard any of Jaskier’s songs. She seems like a sensible sort of person, who likely dismissed the tales the bard had spun as utter bullshit. Geralt trusts her a little more.

“She’s right.” Geralt states, blatantly, flagrantly, lying out of his ass, absent-mindedly reminiscing on his bard’s damsel-in-distress tendencies that conveniently arose whenever Jaskier felt the need to make as big of a nuisance of himself as possible, intermittently, in lieu of him painting a brightly-coloured target on his back and sprinting into danger with a feral yell on his lips, only sometimes figuratively. Dumbass.

Ciri is not as prone to tantrums as Jaskier even when denied hunt-following-privileges. She would take her defeat gracefully with minimal screaming and hopefully only the occasional vengeful blood feud with unnecessary people. She however does stomp her foot and blaspheme. “Melitele’s _spit_.” Geralt frowns. What?

“Language, lass.” The disapproval in the tavern-keeper’s voice is evident, but the displeasing scent of her anxiety has faded without Geralt’s leave, which is telling enough of the strength of her character; any person who remains shitless and uncowed in the face of a mutant’s severity is brave enough to protect and handle the personality of Geralt’s cub. With a nod to Lee, he drags his feet over to Roach’s stable, listening intently for Ciri’s inevitable spiteful retaliation.

“Ma’am?” The too-innocent sugar dripping from Ciri’s mouth instantly raises the hairs on the back of his neck in preparation.

Lee doesn’t seem to notice. “Yes, dear?” Geralt turns subtly to watch from behind a curtain of hair.

“What’s a brothel?” The cub blurts loudly, to the mortification of passer-bys. 

It is remarkably satisfying to see the woman’s face pale and blanch.

Geralt walks to Roach to retrieve his potion satchel with an intermittent bounce in his step before the realisation washes over him that a contract placed on an unknown creature will be more difficult and tedious than one for a handful of drowners. “Fuck.”

  
  


_Twilight greets an unlucky witcher adorned with the shadows_ , so the saying goes. 

_Utter_ bullshit. 

Jaskier spread that rumour on purpose because he found out it wasn’t a witcher prerequisite to wear all-black armour and a lot of them _didn’t_. Geralt retaliated by tripping the bard into a swamp after the first time that line had been recited back to him by a leather worker who’d suggested working in brighter colours into his ensemble. Jaskier laughed himself silly at the blue-grey cuffs Geralt came back with, forgetting to be indignant about his soiled clothing, and the witcher had indeed felt lucky to witness his bard keeled over snorting without dignity or airs.

Until one of the cuffs was ripped off by a siren right before it could tear out Jaskier’s spleen a month later. Geralt’s arm, and Jaskier’s torso, still bore the scar where claws had dragged through the witcher’s skin and continued slicing on the stupid bard he had been trying to protect. Jaskier had initially gone very pale but laughed after Geralt had chopped the monster’s head off, likening the shared wounds and subsequent scars to the cheesy necklaces young lovers favoured, where a full picture or shape could only be formed after the two halves belonging to each lover were brought together. 

Geralt doesn’t like thinking about Jaskier’s scars, even when the bard had amused him with the retelling of what had happened. 

There is a reason witchers are considered unlucky. 

However. Even cloaked in twilight, adorned with shadows or whatever poetic bullshit- Geralt decides witchers can be lucky too if they manage to stumble upon their target accidentally with minimal sleuthing. It must be coincidence, or destiny, if Geralt feels like giving them any credit, that pulls him to the hut just outside town where the alderman lives even before his medallion vibrates.

A figure with billowing hair blinks up at him owlishly, fingers retreating from their position pressed to a sleeping man’s temples. They are shrouded in the dark of the open doorway to the alderman’s hut, a shapeless mass smelling like ozone. Geralt’s first instinct is _bruxa_. Then he registers the glowing fingertips and belt of potions slung around a robed waist.

“Witcher!” The witch smiles, batting her eyelashes.

“You’re not a monster.” Geralt states stupidly, the Vesemir-sounding voice in his head berating how he’s been caught unawares. He corrects his grip, hefting the sword away from the ground.

The woman shrugs. “Debatable, witcher!” She makes no move to look less incriminating, shrugging and shedding incense ash.

“You’re a hedgewitch.” Geralt remembers the controlled chaos harnessed by Yennefer’s magic and the graceful arcs of power casted precisely by long-dead witchers, brothers with wolfish smiles and eyes filling the hallways of a stone stronghold. Hedge-magic has none of the finesse learned by witchers or mages, and this hedgewitch in particular is eager to demonstrate. A black bolt, _nightshade and death_ , according to his nose, cracks the stones laid into the dirt at his feet and disperses with a squelch. The kick-back from the uncontrolled spell wrenches the witch’s wrist back with a snap that sounds painful but only draws giggles from her.

“That was a warning shot, witcher! Take a step further and the next hex will combust every silver hair on your pretty head.” The silver sword in his hand seems all the more appropriate when the witch drops the man cradled in her lap carelessly so she can stand, the witcher wincing at the thud of what must be the alderman’s head bouncing off the ground.

Geralt makes for him, an old, old concern for humanity rearing in his chest, and ducks the next crackle of black aimed directly for his face.

“How are you doing that?” He spits, swearing even as he is able to put himself between the witch and her victim. Hedgewitches are notoriously bad casters, drawing power directly from the earth and they are much more proficient at imbuing objects and making silly charms and potions than flinging offensive curses and spells the way mages do for battle. The entropy spell must be taking its toll; even Yennefer wouldn’t be able to keep up a constant barrage of complicated spells after repeatedly performing a powerful sleep curse.

The witch, as if skimming his thoughts, lights up, face resembling the kind of sociopathic joy that purposely puts unease in the hearts of men. “The curse doesn’t take much power.”

As if to prove her point, a wisp of something burning hot brushes the back of the witcher’s neck, thrust out from her outstretched palm. His medallion hums agitatedly.

The witch is impressed with her own cleverness, sickly sweet pride oozing from every pore, speaking as if she is regaling an audience reminiscent of the way Jaskier would. As it is, her monologuing is giving him an edge. “It _would_ take a lot of power to force someone asleep, and even more for them to stay asleep.” Geralt knows this. He inches forward.

“But, really, my ‘curse’ is a suggestion,” A warning waft of sulfur compels Geralt to drop into a crouch. Something behind him sizzles. Melitele, the alderman better be alright. The witch keeps talking. “Staying asleep is their choice.”

What? No, forget it. Killing whoever is channeling the source of chaos behind a spell usually breaks it. Geralt leaps to his feet, sword poised. He presses the inches he’s gained while the witch was boasting, closing the distance between his sword and her neck faster than she can react-

“You do that, you doom them, witcher.”

His blade freezes before it makes contact. His bones are chilly like ice water was poured over them, stiff and painful.

“Fu-” His lips struggle to curve the right way.

“You’re not going to kill me,” The hedgewitch chimes, shaking her wrist from the aftershocks of the paralysis spell. “They won’t wake up. No one can wake up from this at all.”

Chills wrack his spine. 

“They are looking for someone they lost.” The witch simpers, drawing a painted finger down her cheek like she is tracing the path of a teardrop, except that she presses too hard and her pale skin indents like it's going to split on the edge of her nail gruesomely. Her lips spasm. “Sound familiar, witcher? Someone who has lived as long as you has definitely lost someone important along the way, no? Even if one buys into all the emotionless witcher malarky- which I don’t believe for even a moment- there is a heart in your slowly rotting chest somewhere that wants things, desires people or companionship of whatever bullshit just like any other human.”

“No.” He doesn’t know what he is protesting. “You... talk too much.”

“I’ve heard the songs! The white wolf of Rivia and his raven mistress.” _Fucking bards_. The witch pouts at the expression he makes, or rather the lack of an expression. “You want something. Everyone does.”

“No.” _I want nothing, he’d said. Jaskier’s lovely face twisted in reply._

“Can you imagine?” His bones are getting warmer. He will be able to rotate his joints soon.

“-living in a world where someone who’s left you is once again within your grasp? It’s no wonder none of them wake up- they’re living in their own personal fucking paradises! Come on, witcher, what do you say?” 

“You have deep psychological issues.” Geralt snarks. He is fairly sure he can move his fingers now, but his wrist and elbow stay locked in place.

The paralysis won’t hold. Hedge-magick is hacky. Unclean. A blunt sword with a off-centre-of-mass. Numbness is leached away rapidly by the passage of time, so he just needs to ensure her mouth runs. Has she explained her motivations for cursing some no-name town yet? Geralt can’t find it in himself to particularly care when she’s intentionally murdering innocents, but the opportunity is usually a segue to a fifteen minute sob-story- a sob-story that might save him. There is also a slight chance she’d explained herself and he had tuned her out. “Why are you doing this?”

She stands close, leering. “Were you-” 

His limbs twitch with adrenaline. Geralt twists his stiff wrist furiously to send the silver blade of his sword through the witch’s throat with a messy and unclean slice that would make any witcher flush with embarrassment if they had the capacity for it. The sound of tearing flesh surprises him even as he stands as still as the marble statue Jaskier would compare him to, hand unmoving from its position holding his dagger in place. 

She gurgles.

The witch stares, bug-eyed and still, closing her mouth to stop the stream of guttural syllables that make up the spell. Red trickles from her nostrils. As the witcher feels her swallow around the blade, the vibration snaps him out of his staring to try withdrawing his trembling arm slowly and the slide of the sword out of where it stems the blood flow of her severed artery causes the witch to gag on the sudden outpouring of blood filling her mouth and windpipe. The tensing of her muscles on the sharp edge of the sword pulls tendons further apart while the sword itself is suctioned back into the lubricated hollow of her throat and is wrenched by force out of Geralt’s shamefully shaky grip. The woman takes a step back as if she thinks the distance from the witcher will magically heal her. She bleeds. With every passing second her spell of paralysis weakens to non-existence but Geralt makes no move to take his weapon back, simply watching the dying witch’s lifeblood dye her clothing crimson.

The witch looks down.

She lifts her hands to wrap around the sword's hilt and opens her mouth, her lips curving into a soundless shape of shock. Her hands fall away without removing the blade. She mouths something, soft under her breath like a whisper to the poppies she stands dripping blood onto. Geralt barely hears it with his enhanced hearing but the words make his medallion buzz..

“ _-d̵̮̘̳̅͗ę̸͇͒̇ả̸̲̗̿̈́ͅř̴̞m̶̬͔̹̥̿͠ę̸͓̼̱̓̈́͐̉1. _.” 

She beams at him, teeth blindingly white at the places the proof of her demise does not touch. Geralt frowns and reaches for her as her eyes glaze over, blue like the sky during midday- 

_He wonders if there will ever be a time he looks at the afternoon sky and doesn’t see Jaskier-_

And his lips blister like he has drunk acid. 

A song fills his ears with cotton wool that drowns everything else. Someone is singing. Loudly. Angrily.

Pain brushes his lips- a butterfly’s wings kissing across them, little tingly pecks at the corner, soft and inviting.

Singing, always singing in his head-

“ _If life could give you one blessing_ -”

His back is wet from where it's pressed flat to the ground.

His muscles cramp like they’re tensing for a fight, which is what drives him to sit up with a groan and move his torso away from the freezing damp grass. The smell of it is dewey and earthy, and iron like fleshly spilled blood- from- from the witch? The soil is wet with it. Sifting shaky fingers through the soiled dirt, he tries to pull himself together. He had slayed the witch and blood bloomed across the silk of her dress like roses in a bush- 

“- _It would be me._ ”

-or dandelions in spring, forcing yellow buds shooting through leftover snow and slush to peer at the sun like inquisitive children-

Iron stains the underneath of his fingernails. Red like Jaskier’s lips when he worries them between his teeth as he concentrates. Little rusted roses grow under the rough translucent material which could be shaped into a claw if Geralt grew it out but he doesn’t because he is worried he will scare people, scare Jaskier when the edge of it rusts with blood. It would also cause him to be less inclined to touch Jaskier, to brush the curves and chase the warmth of his skin if his fingers smell like iron as every point of contact will be tainted by Geralt’s ugliness and the stench of iron, so everytime he scents Jaskier he can smell his own failings- his own sub-humanness marring his sweet, human bard’s skin, and he really likes touching Jaskier too much for his own sanity. Except that Jaskier smelled like iron sometimes. What was with that? Jaskier shouldn’t smell like iron. It makes Geralt’s brain howl and scream that he has failed Jaskier, he has let his best friend get hurt-

His lucidity slips like he’s holding water in barely cupped hands.

Where’s the blood from? His fingers are slippery. What did he do? He doesn’t remember. Jaskier’s hurt. Jaskier smells like iron. The facts can be mutually exclusive.

Where’s the- Was there-?

His medallion is burning a hole in his chest like it wants to open him up and see if there is a heart nestled between his ribcage, but there won’t be because someone has taken it far, far away from the cold grass and slippery hands that smell like iron. 

Where’s-

Where did he go?

“Jaskier?”

Jaskier smelled like iron sometimes even when he did not bleed. Or maybe he had bled. Did Geralt rip him apart?

Why was there so much blood?

His head hurts. His chest hurts. The grass stiffens under his fingers into shards of glass or rock, pebbles slicing his hands open so there is even more red.

“Jask?” 

Where has he gone? What has Geralt done? The mountains are cold. The inside of his chest is so cold. 

He stumbles down the path, head spinning with words that taste like ash and salt- sorrow, so much sorrow and loss like manacles around his limbs and limiting his movement-

“ _If life could give me one blessing-_ ”

Why did Geralt let Jaskier go down the mountain by himself? There are wolves and bandits that will kill him and tear him apart like paper left in the rain for too long, so Geralt needs to save his bard. How had jaskier made it down the mountain so fast? Geralt needs to find him. Where had he gone?

“Jask!” The landscape blurs into monochrome. The witcher cranes his neck to catch the blue eyes in the corner of his field of vision.

_He’s gone. There’s no one there. There never is- except-_

“Why were you running?” Jaskier asks, smiling with naked curiosity.

Geralt stares unblinkingly, mouth ever so slightly agape. The bard steps off the grass and onto the path carefully, leaving a trail of trampled dandelions with lopped off heads and broken necks, leaking sour sap. The blue of his shirt emphasises the question in Jaskier’s eyes to an obvious firework of unspoken words, thrumming right behind his eyelids like the force of nature Jaskier is.

Um. “I- I was- there was blood…” The bard’s eyes _are so blue_. Geralt cuts himself off when the muted odor of worry wafts into his nostrils.

Jaskier gives him a hurried and concerned once-over like he always does when Geralt is back from a hunt. “Blood? I don’t see any blood.” The wildflower smell is overpowering when Jaskier takes a few steps closer, cloying like the bard had been laying down in the flower field moments ago despite the lack of pollen dusting his brightly coloured clothing.

And Jaskier smells like iron. But there is no blood. Is there?

“Aw. Darling. Everything’s alright now.” Jaskier’s lovely musician’s hands swipe across Geralt’s cheekbones with a tenderness that curls the witcher’s toes. “Stop worrying. Stop needlessly fretting over something you can’t remember in the first place..”

Geralt grits his teeth and closes his eyes so he won’t have to gaze directly at the painfully vivid azure of the bard’s chemise. Jaskier is smart. Jaskier is observant. Telepathy, however, is not within the realm of his ability, so how did he know-

“I’m here.” The words are fingernails on slate, echoing in the recesses of the witcher’s mind as his migraine worsens. “It’s me, dear heart.”

Geralt glances at his bard from under his lashes. There’s blood on the gleaming white of Jaskier’s teeth. Why is there blood?

“Everything’s alright. Don’t worry about that now.” Jaskier’s hands tighten on his face. The world dims. “I’m _here_.”

“...you’re here.” Geralt agrees. He is here. Oil and wildflowers. Not a ghost or spectre- the kind that burns its afterimage into his peripheral and is unkillable by spectre oil. “How are you here?”

“Did I ever leave?” Jaskier smirks like he knows Geralt is missing something. Something obvious. It tickles his senses. Grates. Like a heartbeat gone wrong. A misstep in a dance. Jaskier doesn’t misstep. 

“You always do.” He always leaves. They always do. The witcher wants to wrap his arms around his bard’s shoulders and never let go. “Why do you always leave?”

“I always come back.” 

“You do.” Geralt agrees again. An agreement except in the ways it isn’t. Something is _wrong_. The hairs at the back of his neck are needles. “Except that you didn’t. Not this time.”

_There’s no one there. There never is._

“‘This time’?”Jaskier snorts, shifting his weight from foot to foot. There is no smell of anxiety. “Then how am I here now?”

How is Jaskier here now? How? How _howhow_?

_There is a ghost that never leaves._

“You-” There is blood under his fingernails that smells like iron and rust. Jaskier smells like only a memory. Geralt once read in a book that smell was the sense most closely associated with remembrance. “You’re not.”

“I’m not?” Jaskier, the memory of Jaskier, echoes. “Are you certain?”

“Stop it. Shut up.” Geralt’s heart pounds. Not-Jaskier’s does not. “You’re trying to confuse me.”

Whatever-the-thing-is, not-Jaskier, _its laughs are sharp and there is something wrong_ , chuckles. “You don’t need any help being confused, dear heart.”

“Stop!” His head aches with grief. His ears ring with the force of it. 

_I imagine you’re probably-_

_If life could-_

_That’s not-_

_Did you know a bard-_

_Now he’s de-_

_Can you imagine-_

“I’m dreaming.” Geralt gasps. “I’m dreaming like the townsfolk. I was cursed.”

 _Dearme._ Then red.

Memories give him a migraine, forcing the contents of his stomach to twist painfully. But he does not wake up. The pain feels real. He remembers what happened. He is lucid. Why isn’t he waking?

Not-Jaskier watches, head tilting to one side, eyes dancing.

“You’re not real.” Geralt spits. Jaskier is _gone._

The memory almost seems shocked at his declaration, eyes wide and blue. 

Then it scuffs its feet on the road nervously. “What if I am?”

“Bullshit.” The witcher insists immediately. What if he is? No. No, no, no. Geralt isn’t waking. But. He’s gone. 

“What if I were to tell you that, in fact, I am really Jaskier, transported into your head via magical means to help break this curse?”

A pleasant dream. Yennefer’s cool fingertips on his temples, a spell chanted right into the empty space in his ears. Such a pleasant dream- that Jaskier would come back. That Jaskier could come back. It was Geralt’s fault, wasn’t it? For never finding out the fate of his bard. Jaskier could be dead, but as long as Geralt doesn’t know, Jaskier is alive, in a twisted, pathetic way. If Geralt never finds out how badly he fucked up, he can pretend Jaskier will come back. Geralt wants to pretend. Badly.

But Jaskier’s _gone_. This isn’t him.

“I would then tell you that you’re full of bullshit.” Geralt rasps, heart hammering faster.

Jaskier- not-Jaskier claps his hands and laughs. “And you would be absolutely correct, but you wouldn’t be able to tell, not truly.” The witcher’s head revolts. What? “I _am_ Jaskier, my dearest witcher.”

“No.”

“Ah, the seed of doubt is planted, isn’t it? Am I Jaskier? Or aren’t I?”

“You definitely talk as much as he does.” Geralt grabs the bard’s shoulders, but is incapable of shoving him away.

Jaskier mimics him. “So I am Jaskier, then?”

Yes? His head hurts. “No.”

“Oh dear, you keep saying that but you honestly can’t figure it out, can you?” Words are stupid. And arbitrary. Geralt hates talking, hates the way the words get stuck in his throat and other people’s words spin circles around his head.

Jaskier is standing very close, palms drifting to bracket his face. The witcher can only stare helplessly. So blue. So much blue. “You want me to be real so bad... you want me to have come back to you so _fucking_ badly, that you’re deluding yourself.”

Rude. “You’re not real. You’re not Jaskier.”

The man sighs, dropping his hands. Geralt’s face feels cold. “I don’t know that. I can’t. Because you don’t know that.” He steps back. The chasm of space left between them gnaws at the witcher’s feet.

“I do.”

Jaskier humours him. “Do you? I’ve given you a plausible explanation, and you want it to be real so badly that I think you lapped it up in your desperation.”

Geralt doesn’t even remember what the explanation was. Why is Jaskier-

It’s not Jaskier. 

Geralt heaves his feet away from the blurring path. It had been a mountain not two minutes ago.

Trees the height of wyverns dwarf the campsite. The shadows between the leaves flicker like they’re forgetting what they’re supposed to be. Geralt can relate. The change in scenery is sudden and gives him vertigo, but when he tries to remember the previous scenery it slips away faster.

“Sit down. You are going to hurt yourself.” The spectre says tiredly, settling by the fire. The familiar picture of Geralt’s bard beckoning him to the warmth of the flames the witcher doesn’t remember igniting builds a pressure behind his eyes.

Geralt breathes in. Wood. Smoke. _Iron._ “I can’t. I’m dreaming. I am literally incapable of sitting down.”

The Jaskier-shaped thing chuckles, the threat in his eyes belying his good naturedness. “Humour me.” His palm slaps the ground. Geralt _wants_.

“No.” He says, even as his knees give out and he sprawls ungracefully next to the bard. The trees whisper among themselves.

Jaskier beams, teeth glittering like a polished knife catching firelight in the dark, and Geralt’s mind empties like a bucket of water with a hole in it.

A lute dangles from Jaskier’s fist as he swings it side-to-side, the brightness of the gold engravings inducing a headache. “Do you want me to sing the one with the mermaid and prince that you like but refuse to admit so?” The lute is tucked to the bard’s torso. His fingers ghost the knobs and panels, tuning mindlessly.

“Does it matter what I want?” Geralt huffs. The finger-placings look off. Less practiced. Maybe he wasn’t feeling well. “You’re going to sing it anyway.”

“That’s not very appreciative behaviour.” The bard frowns. The wind howls. “Why can’t you just say ‘sing the one with the mermaid and prince that I like, Jaskier’?”

 _Jaskier._ The witcher’s mouth complies. “Sing the one with the mermaid and prince, Jaskier.”

“Alright, but only because you asked so nicely.” His eyelids flutter closed. Geralt swallows at the fan of his eyelashes on his cheek.

“ _I may only sing with the voice you’ve given I,_

_I may only walk with the flesh you’ve given I,_

_But I may not love for I’ve misplaced my heart_

_And you have yet to give me yours_.”

Geralt waits, but the bard has stopped, rubbing his fingertips over the frets of his lute contemplatively. Jaskier is rarely silent. It is unnerving to experience, like a doppler shifting- just off to the senses. Something is off about him today. The song doesn’t sound right.

Jaskier looks up so quickly that Geralt is captured by his line of sight, frozen. “Do you think of yourself as the mermaid, Geralt?”

It takes a minute. “Don’t be ridiculous.” The witcher scoffs, mouth dry.

“Are you not the metaphorical fish-out-of-water, learning to live amongst people, learning to be human and falling in love with a human?” How- What-

“That’s not how the story goes.” Geralt grits his teeth. Is Jaskier making fun of him?

The bard hums. It vibrates in his ears. “The story’s like this-”

_She dest-_

“-once upon a time, there was a boy who fell in love-” Geralt’s head spins and spins.

_I’m weak-_

Geralt doesn’t remember the words or why they’re important. “I am familiar with the fairytale; shut your mouth, bard.”

Jaskier walks over to him. Or he must have, because Geralt is suddenly staring right at his face, their noses inches apart. “Do you think of yourself as a tragedy?”

Geralt stiffens. Jaskier sidles closer. “Oh, darling.”

Geralt’s face is cradled by calloused hands, the soft pads running across his cheekbones. “What-” _-are you doing?_

Jaskier tastes sweet. 

The forest howls and warps, but Jaskier is here, Jaskier tastes like peaches and-

_Iron._

Something soft and satiny slips between his lips. He chokes on its bitterness. The sour stench of it nauseates him, so he spits it out, and it is a small folded piece of yellow silk, dotted with red.

“Buttercups do burn on the way down, don’t they?” Jaskier laughs shrilly. The sap blisters on Geralt’s tongue.

It tastes like strychnine, which he’s ingested before on accident but Geralt’s never eaten a buttercup so he wouldn’t know what it tastes like and this curse wouldn’t be able to use it against him-

“I need to get the fuck out of here.” Geralt whispers amidst not-Jaskier’s peals of laughter. His temples throb. He had forgotten in a matter of minutes. How had he-

“You’ll forget again.” Jaskier promises sunnily. “Give it another minute.”

Geralt throws up in a field of buttercups and wills his vision to stop spinning.

His mouth is dry. He remembers it being this dry before, that one night Lambert had brought back dodgy fisstech to Kaer Morhen and Geralt had woken up alone wearing only Eskel’s shirt in the courtyard. He groans. Water trickles past his lips.

 _Fetch me water, Geralt,_ _his mother orders, the look in her eye painfully sharp. Her hands are shaking, and Geralt foolishly believes that is the reason she asks him to get the water instead of fetching it herself._

_“No cod, carp, pike nor bream._

_Just fetch me water, fetch me gold,_

_Fetch me ev’ry jewel sold,_

_And fetch me your heart_

_Before I’m gone-_

_Or pay an expense untold.”_

He is fishing, net dragging up muck and dirt from the grey river spilling around the edges of the bank. Grey teeth, biting at the shore and the flowers. It might be biting at his submerged feet and hands, but he is too numb to feel it. Jaskier traipses into the shallows of the river, a spot of cornflower blue in the monochrome world Geralt is trapped in. The witcher ignores him. His hands go back to pushing the net underwater, where it catches on debris of old clothing and metal utensils. A rusty fork scratches his fingers until the humid air smells like iron instead of sewage.

In the back of his mind, Geralt half-expects a little brown amphora with the mockery of a god’s symbol etched on the flat cork by a less-than-immortal man trying to be bigger than he was. Compensating. The bottle has no wax seal. It is meant to be discovered, to be opened and used. Some things are made for a purpose- made to be used a specific way such that doing otherwise will break them, so Geralt obliges. Or he would, if he could find the bottle. Information about its contents eludes him, as does its location. Why is he looking for an amphora anyway? Hadn’t he been looking for something else?

His mind whirs a little faster and it even clears his vision enough to watch the murky waters of the river turn clear and blue. Then Jaskier tilts his head to the side. Geralt knows this because he can hear the creaking of the bones in his neck and the rustle of silk against silk when his collar rubs on his damp undershirt. Geralt’s mind quietens, his hands slipping on the net such that he clumsily dregs up dirt from the river bed that hides the river away in a veil of grey.

“There are no fishies. No cod, carp, pike nor bream.” Jaskier giggles and pats the water to stir it up. “What are you looking for?”

Fingers tighten. Up goes the net. Forks and fabric tangle in the interwoven rope. The net goes back down and the forks and fabric hide in the stirred water. “Something important.”

Jaskier is sitting in the shallows, water lapping around his waist. Looking at him hurts, so Geralt does not.

“What are you looking for?” Jaskier says again, insistently, petulantly, a vision in blue and grey.

Geralt pulls the net up. “Something I lost.” Armour pieces, empty potion bottles and knives.

Jaskier laughs, like bells and whistles in the wind. “Lost? What did you lose?” 

“I don’t remember.”The witcher shakes his head and pushes the net down again. Rinse. Repeat.

“You’ve been at this for ages. Maybe you should stop looking.” His hand freezes. “I don’t think you’re going to find it.”

Geralt pulls the net up. It's empty. The belly of a hungry wolf.

Jaskier’s answering laughter sounds like bottles clinking together and shattering. “Called it.”

The net slips from his fingers and disappears into the river’s depths. Jaskier watches it, expression clouding. “Do you want to know why you’re not going to find anything?”

Jaskier hisses through his teeth, “Because you’re not actually looking.” The water he sits in is turbulent and hostile.

Looking at him hurts, it hurts so much, like wildflowers clogging his breathing tube. 

“Put your head under the water, Geralt.” Jaskier is clever. Jaskier is reasonable. Jaskier wouldn’t hurt him.

_-it would be me._

His lungs burn, convulsing on nothing as long, unnaturally strong fingers digging into his hair drag him up. The river floor has dropped away beneath his feet but he is not drowning yet. It’s like waking up from Axii. He remembers the feeling.

_Can you help me find my ma?_

_Your mother isn’t coming back, boy._

_She is! I just have to get the water to her._

_You’re going to hurt yourself. Put the bucket down._

_No._

_Put it down._

_No!_

_The man’s hand moves and Geralt puts the bucket down, arm muscles slackening. He spills most of the water before he remembers._

“You’re not Jaskier.” The spectre’s hand spasms in his hair, irritation creeping into not-Jaskier’s face.

“Aren’t I?” The river surface draws a noose taut around the witcher’s neck but there is no compassion in the ghost perched on the river bank. “I feel like we’ve had this conversation before, dear heart. I am everything you think of him, the culmination of every little piece of himself that he’s given you over the years you’ve known him.”

Jaskier lets go, hand retracting to his side. His sleeves are wet.

Unanchored, Geralt tries not to let his head slip underwater, kicking at nothing. It’s all in his head, isn’t it?

“I have power.” The bard-shaped thing whispers in lieu of an answer. “Because you know he has power over you.”

Geralt gags on the water streaming into his mouth, tipping his head back to spit it out. Water fills his ears.

He hears the next words anyway. “I have control, because you know he can control you. Probably one of the few people who can.”

“If you know Jaskier as well as you think you do… if you are the one person on this continent who knows your bard’s thoughts, feelings and characteristics better than anyone… then how am I not Jaskier?” 

“Jaskier wouldn’t-” _Hurt me,_ he doesn’t say. His head bobs below the surface, purposefully stopping his breathing, and his feet finally, finally, land on firm ground just as his lungs begin to clench in discomfort. He plants his boots in the sand with more force than necessary, propelling him straight into the bank. Jaskier is quiet. Watching with uncharacteristic patience.

Pulling himself upright, Geralt sputters out the water that had found its way into his lungs, glaring at the deceptively shallow river. He sticks his hand in and his fingertips scratch the cluttered bottom before his elbow gets any wetter. 

“Fucking curse.” He groans, wringing his shirt without taking it off. He sinks into the dirt a metre away from the ghost.

Not-Jaskier grins cheekily in his peripheral. “If you know everything-”

“There’s plenty I don’t know about Jaskier.” Geralt can smell the muted amusement wafting off his not-bard. He closes his eyes so he doesn’t have to see its face. The lapping of the water grows faint.

Not-Jaskier prods him with a familiar calloused finger. “You have guessed at his past enough to make logical assumptions. Even if there are things you don’t want to admit to yourself.” 

Geralt hisses a breath between his teeth.

Not-his-bard keeps prodding. “You don’t even trust him, do you? Some part of you doesn’t- why else cast me to play the role of the villain in all this? _He’s hiding something._ ” He sounds livid.

Geralt’s eyes fly open in confusion. He rises to his feet slowly. “I don’t understand.” Not-Jaskier rolls his eyes, copying the witcher’s movement.

“...could’ve been your mother. Could’ve been any one of the brothers or friends you’ve lost to the path.” Guilt sours his mouth. The bard keeps talking. “Instead, you got me.”

“I-” He hadn’t thought of that. He hadn’t...

“You are missing the fucking point!” Not-Jaskier shoves him, spontaneous frustration deepening his voice to a howl, “Stop angsting, Geralt of Rivia!”

“Go fuck yourself!” The cornered animal in his chest spits venomously. He grabs Jaskier’s wrist when the bard moves to poke him, fury seizing, but misses and pulls to himself something rounded and muddy Jaskier had been holding onto. Part of it slips to the floor with the sound of breaking porcelain and metal snapping in the face of sheer force. He sees the bard propelled backwards, rocking unsteadily on his heels.

Geralt chances a glance downwards, hands tightening on a familiar cork emblazoned with a familiar seal.

The djinn’s amphora lays in pieces at his feet, and he has not yet bent to inspect it but his arm is already bleeding with vertical slashes craved through the skin like brands.

“What did you wish for?” A whisper, like wind or smoke. His eyes are burning, even if his arm is numb.

_I wish I apologised-_

_I wish I deserved you-_

_I wish-_

“For nothing.” Jaskier sing-songs, walking forward with dancer’s steps, or a fencer’s footwork. Rapier poised even with empty hands. “You want nothing; just some peace, remember?”

_Peace._

Geralt’s knees buckle. Time slips away.

He blinks and the amphora is gone. The river has turned into a forest. It must have happened while his coherency came and went in waves. Up and down- like the ridges on a selkiemaw. It went faster when Jaskier was around.

“I’m not looking for you. For _Jaskier_.” He tiredly tells the boots on the image of his bard.

“Sure you aren’t.” Oxenfurt sounds awful. Like Novrigrad. Big city, the bustle of civilisation chasing away monsters but inviting sensory overload. But it would have been better with Jaskier, if the bard ever asked to spend a winter together. Any place would have been better with Jaskier. Even fucking Blaviken. 

“You love me.” The bard pulls the words from his mind with the precision of a needle pulling thread.

Prick. Geralt glares at him even though his neck protests. “I really need to wake the fuck up.”

“Ha! What will you do? Pinch yourself really hard?” Jaskier is within throttling range. He is talking very loudly for someone within throttling range. Rage is difficult to suppress when exhaustion dulls his steadfast self-control.

“I need to stop talking to myself.” Geralt muses seriously to himself, pretending he isn’t a sentence away from breaking his bard’s nose.

“And talk to Roach instead, you introverted bastard?” The witcher grinds his teeth.

“Why?!” He thunders, “Are you so insistent on pissing me off?”

“You make it so easy-” Geralt roars at the smirk on Jaskier’s face and takes two strides to shove the idiotic bastard into the river and hold his head underwater. At least, that is his intention, although all his manhandling yields is a struggling bard with pinned wrists stubbornly refusing to let his body mass get shifted from where it is rooted to the earth. Geralt scowls and his fingers loosen to end his futile effort to drown the man. Instantly, Jaskier is dead weight like layers of clothing in water and Geralt tightens his grasp instinctively even as he is dragged to the ground by Jaskier’s descent, falling face first into the bard’s chest.

It is easy to forget there is no way a human would weigh anything close to heavy for a witcher when the low breathy groan of strain Jaskier makes when Geralt falls onto him is vibrating in his ears. He stays there, stupidly, breathing in the wildflower and linseed oil scent tingling on his tongue and trying his best not to bury his nose into the crook of his bard’s neck. 

Jaskier notices his hesitance, because of course he does. The rumbling of slightly stifled laughter, so familiar yet completely alien, doubles the heated pressure in the corner of his eyes. Fuck. Gods he had missed- misses Jaskier. He growls and seals his eyes tight, drying them on the wet shirt he is swaddled in as discreetly as he is able. “Shut up.”

“Oh, I don’t think you want me to.” Jaskier smirks. Geralt’s nostrils burn with iron and lust. Warm blood and spice. The witcher tries to push himself up, except that his hands are still attached to Jaskier’s and they press on the bard’s wrist bones, hard against the ground. All he succeeds in doing is drive the bard’s hands into the dirt and half raise himself to loom over him.

Jaskier whimpers softly, drying any apology Geralt might have been able to muster with the long line of his neck, exposed by the way his head is tossed back. His lashes shutter over the blue of his eyes. A crescent slip of them gleams like glass bottles in the light the canopy lets through.

“Seems to me… that you see something you like, witcher.” Jaskier purrs, wrists going slack under Geralt’s grip.

The witcher swallows, watching the man beneath him mirror the motion with a bob of his adam’s apple. “Shut. Up.”

Jaskier tilts his head up, lidded eyes inches from Geralt’s. “I don’t think I will.”

Geralt lets go of the other man and recoils, partially out of shock at the desire that hisses sharply in his blood- like heated iron in a flood. 

Jaskier cocks his head to the side like a bird, sensual and dangerous in every way he pretends not to be and it hastens Geralt’s heart rate to something too near a normal human’s to be comfortable. The bard stretches towards him and Gods, the expression on Jaskier’s face is wicked with the curve of his lips as his fingertips close around the witcher’s wrist and lock in place, grip unwavering when he places Geralt’s hands on the pliant skin of his waist. The hiked-up shirt settles over his palms, hiding them from view by a layer of embroidered fabric, but Geralt can feel the flesh burning beneath his fingers so heatedly that the lack of sight only serves to heighten his awareness of how his hands are _right on Jaskier’s waist,_ _holy shit._ The witcher thinks he must be heavy- resting his weight on Jaskier- but the bard only presses his palms over Geralt’s hands into his flesh bruisingly. 

“Geralt,” The bard purrs, lovely and spread beneath him. “What do you want?”

“Nothing. I want nothing.” Geralt says with so little conviction the other man laughs.

“All your life, you’ve never let yourself want anything, or simply forced yourself to stop wanting, so it wouldn’t hurt when you didn’t get what you wanted. Did you ever consider that you never got what you wanted because you never wanted?”

Geralt bites the inside of his cheek so he doesn’t have to answer, shame staining the tips of his ears.

“Why are you complicating this? Why are you protesting?” Jaskier murmurs fervently, a flush high on the Apple of his cheeks. “Why can’t you just say ‘Jaskier, I’d very much like you to kiss me’, and we can move on from there?”

“J- Jaskier.” _Jaskier’s legs are tangled with his_. His thoughts coalesce and collapse in on themselves. “I’d like you to kiss me.”

“No.” The bard grins. “I’d like you to _choose_ me.”

Existing is so simple, so easy to do with Jaskier.

Geralt leans in and it feels like he’s plunging his head underwater. Jaskier parts the witcher’s lips with his tongue.

Jaskier tastes like iron. It is somehow more believable than strychnine.

Jaskier tastes like iron. 

The taste of freshly spilled blood jolts his system. Geralt shoves him, hard.

“No.” Jaskier relaxes back into the dirt at his protest, mouth reddened and wet. Blue eyes search his fervently and Geralt would try to discern his bard’s intent if not for how the blue of them is a mirror, simply reflecting Geralt’s own confusion.

“Why?” The bard whispers, voice wrecked.

“I… I don’t know.” Geralt lets Jaskier climb out from beneath him. 

“Why do you always deny yourself what you want?” They settle across from each other, cross-legged and mere inches apart.

“I don’t know.”

Jaskier sighs. His face twists, and Geralt’s heart shudders in response. 

“I lo-” The rest of his sentence turns into roses with thorns scraping the inside of his throat. He coughs, trying to shape the words into what they’re supposed to, but it is like trying to hold water that slipped continually through the cracks in his fingers. “I-”

“Am sorry?” Jaskier suggests, plucking out words again. Geralt nods gratefully amidst his dry-heaving. The ache in his throat and the lead on his tongue lessens incrementally. 

Jaskier pats him on the back, eyes as wet as his. “Oh, I know, dear heart. I know.”

“Do you?” Geralt rasps. “You’re not even my bard.”

“I _am_ your bard. Jaskier _isn’t._ ” The memory of him smiles innocuously. “What do you love about Jaskier?”

His hands. Legs. Heart. “He’s loyal.”

“Gorgeous?”

“Hmm.” _Really_ fantastically dexterous hands attached to lithely muscled forearms.

Jaskier flashes his teeth like he can hear Geralt’s thoughts. He probably can. “You realise I am all those things, right?”

“Because you’re what I imagine of Jaskier?”

“Because _I am Jaskier_ , fool.”

The denial is automatic. “You’re not.”

“I’m better.”

Geralt has no response to that. There is no scent of a lie, which means deep down, Jaskier- and ergo Geralt- must believe it to some degree.

Could-be-Jaskier gets bored as easily as Gone-Jaskier does.

_“The price of living is your voice,_

_The price of wanting your heart-_

_Twenty years you’ll have to acquire another_

_And tomorrow you shall start.”_

If there is anything that distinguishes Could-be-Jaskier and Gone-Jaskier’s singing, Geralt wouldn’t know. They sound the same to his relatively untrained ear- breathy and deep in the right places, on time, on tune. That much he knows. Equal penchant for halting mid-song as if deep in thought. Geralt likes watching him, mind feverishly whirring in an attempt to catalogue every little twitch of Jaskier’s facial muscles.

“How does the story go?” Geralt asks. He doesn’t know which story he is referring to. Maybe the mermaid and the prince’s. Maybe Jaskier’s.

“Once upon a time, there was a boy who fell in love.” It could be either.

“Then?”

“I don’t know, do I? You never asked before.” Jaskier keeps playing, and Geralt’s mind quietens with every note.

_“Oh, apologies little beast,_

_Did you not see it on your own?_

_Failure will be your foaming crown;_

_The coastal tide your throne._

_...wild things like you belong alone.”_

Geralt closes his eyes. His medallion _burns_ with how intensely it is vibrating.

  
  


“You’re finally awake! I was worried you would sleep forever!”

Someone dressed in a pale yellow shirt and maroon pants tucked into calf-high boots scrambles over to him, cheer undiminished by his own clumsiness. 

The grass beneath Geralt is red. The witch’s? Is he awake? He doesn’t remember but he is sure it is not as important as the bard that drops to his knees, falling forward into the witcher’s lap. Jaskier is warm and solid, wearing something eye-searing as per usual. They stare at each other, Geralt looking up at the other man. His heart aches so badly he can’t bear to sit still against the humming in his bones.

He stands, dislodging his bard.

Jaskier laughs and gracefully springs back to his feet, a scant few inches from Geralt.

It’s easy to forget they’re of a similar height. But they are- aren’t they? 

Jaskier leans into his palm, and Geralt strokes the edges of his grin. Touches his lips. Soft as a butterfly’s wings tapping together in a kiss. There is an air of finality and triumph to Jaskier’s grin. 

Geralt used to know his heartbeat like it was his own. He doesn’t remember anymore. So many little things Geralt had been forgetting about his bard.

Even pressed nearly chest to chest, there is no audible heartbeat. Geralt could pretend that there is. Pretend he is finally awake- that the curse is broken. Pretending is easy.

“This isn’t real, is it?” It’s not a question. Jaskier’s face fractures in his mind’s eye like the reflection of a mirror that was dropped onto the floor. He cradles not-Jaskier’s face anyway. “You’re like Jaskier, but you’re not real. It’s not real. And I wanted it to be real so badly I forgot it wasn’t.”

“It can be.” The desperation edging into the bard’s voice flushes guilt into Geralt’s chest. “I promise you what you feel for Jaskier is real. And I am really everything you know and think of Jaskier. I am the closest you’ll get to what you want, my darling.”

“You don’t know that. You can’t, because I don’t know that.”

“Is it worth the risk?” Jaskier is angry now, hands clawing at the witcher’s shirt. “I don’t think you’re ever going to find what you’re looking for.”

Geralt hums. “And you know what I am looking for?” 

“Do you?” Jaskier snaps, to the witcher’s amusement.

Geralt’s cheeks are wet.

Jaskier releases him. “Alright. I’ll bite.” The bard steps in closer, _his lovely face twisting_.

“What are you looking for?” Not-Jaskier murmurs, soft and wanting like the real thing would be in the wee hours of twilight when the world faded out of their peripheral and the only thing left would be just a witcher and his bard. Except that this Jaskier’s smiles are too soft and his laughs too sharp. Because it’s how Geralt remembers his bard. He’s not real.

Geralt kisses him anyway. “You.” 

“You have me now. Stay.” The bard’s eyes are a promise, summer-sky-in-the-afternoon-blue. Blue the way the ocean is blue when it pulls ships and men to its depths. Devastating, such promises. Geralt has always understood the wild that creeps into sailors’ eyes at the song of a siren. 

Geralt snorts wetly. Jaskier had rubbed off on him with his poetic sense and flowery metaphors.

_I may not love for I’ve misplaced my heart_

_And you have yet to give me yours_.

“Can you imagine?” He asks instead.

The other man doesn’t react to the emotion straining his voice, only presses a kiss to his palm. “Imagine what?”

“Living in a world where someone you lost is once again within your reach.”

“You don’t have to imagine.” The bard promises and promises, eyelashes fluttering in a steady staccato.

“I know.” Geralt is very close to drowning. Jaskier is his siren and he has one foot out his little wooden boat, one foot in the water so brilliantly blue he can’t see beneath the surface even when his face is submerged. 

“But I never really lost you, did I?”

The bard opens his mouth and the witcher puts his hand over it to cut him off before Geralt can change his mind. He moves the pads of his fingers on not-Jaskier’s lips tenderly. “My humble bard.”

The spectre stares, silent. The world is silent except for distant singing; one last siren song to drown him and to drag him into the depths to sleep.

“ _If life could give me one blessing-_ ”

“I love you.” Geralt whispers. He’s never been good at talking, but this is easy. The thorns don’t come to clog his throat. 

_Three words or less, Jaskier crooned sweetly, eyes shining._

“I love you. I love you, I love-”

“ _-it would be you._ ”

  
  


His eyes open and he is looking at a cloudless blue sky. The world is blurry and spinning, shifting at the corner of his eyes. He panics for a moment when he thinks he is still under the throes of the curse until he rubs his eyes and brushes tears that send a kaleidoscope of colours across his vision.

The sky really is a lovely shade of blue in midday.

  
  


Ciri stares with wide, vaguely impressed eyes when he makes it back to the village with minimal injuries, swinging the witch’s decapitated head behind him by the sword he is too tired to separate from the corpse’s throat. The blood had congealed around it in a dirty brown vice of viscera. Ciri pulls herself together without much fuss and squeamishness- bless her and her youthful tolerance that gives her the ability to put up with anything out of sheer inexperience- and demands to follow him to the alderman so she can make sure he doesn’t ‘collapse off the road and get fucking eaten by wild dogs’. Geralt gives her what he hopes is a discouraging glower in reply. Swearing is bad. Parents do not tolerate their children swearing. He tells her so.

“You were gone for two days, _Dad_!” She justifies while runs after him, clasping the enormous folds of her cloak in her fingers to prevent the hem from dragging through the dust. Anxiety wafts off her everytime the witcher exceeds more than a distance of two metres away from her, making his nose itch and crinkle up while his feet slow ever so slightly. He is getting soft. He is already too soft. “Did you eat during those days? Did you even drink water? Were you cursed? Did you see the other people who were cursed?”

Witchers can survive long periods of time without eating or drinking despite how living without sustenance feels uncomfortably like centipedes crawling around the insides of his stomach lining. Two days is hardly stretching his limits but emotional exhaustion does take its toll, as does conversing with humans and facing Jaskier, even a fake one, is very tiring. “The other people will be fine. They’ll be waking up soon.” Humans are more resilient than people give credit for. “They might wake faster if other people spoke to them. Remind them of what they haven't lost.”

“...and _you_ are alright?”

“Hm.” He says, just to see her reaction.

Ciri throws her hands up exasperatedly, looking to the world like she would like to pray to every god in existence for patience to put up with him. Geralt fears the moment she and Yennefer meet, or her inevitable re-acquaintance with his bard. Although his nonanswers riling up Jaskier and Ciri at the same time might be hilarious. Hm. He’s raising a monster.

“I’m alright, Ciri.” Her glare lets up, though her fussing does not even after they’ve left the local lord’s house, Geralt’s coin pouch heavier than when he entered.

She huffs as he skillfully dodges her attempt at a hug. “Fine. Keep your angst to yourself.”

 _Stop angsting, Geralt of Rivia._ Geralt chuckles. Ciri’s expression softens, a gently genuine smile settling into place like a weary hound returning home to the indent it’s left on a carpet in front of the fireplace. 

She follows him back to Roach, and tilts her head when he doesn’t even bother to keep up the pretense of going in the direction of Kaedwen. “So. Where are we going?”

Geralt hums as if he is actually considering her question and had not made up his mind since the moment he awoke with the smell of tears stinging his nose. 

“Oxenfurt.”

In the corner of his eye- _burning his retinas like drinking Cat in midday_ \- Ciri’s braided platinum hair gleaming like the sun. There is no one else.

But there will be soon, if Geralt has anything to say about it.

  1. Dearme [Elder]: Meaning sleep; good night (phrase) [ ▲ ]



**Author's Note:**

> Utterly unhinged! That's what this fic is! I'll be pleased to be back writing a linear and coherent (ish) POV in the next fic. It was once mentioned faeries smelled like iron, in Litany of the Flower. Make of that what you will.
> 
> Keep up with my bullshit on tumblr.
> 
> [@Might-be-entropy](https://might-be-entropy.tumblr.com/)
> 
> And I will be answering questions in the comments regarding any confusion as to what the fuck went down in this fic.


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